Well, my first impressions....I see there is more to learn than I thought. Need to learn more about the settings.....I have not had the opportunity to scuba yet with it, only free dive. Free dive is considerably more difficult but here is how it went.
I found the shutter much slower than expected, but will mess with settings to see if this will improve. Even when I used program, it was really slow. But, as I said, I will definitely try many other settings before I make a judgement. The fist time I used it in the pool, it did not seem to be that slow, so maybe I had a wierd setting on it without knowing. Also, the CAL Pac coast is really a dark water even in shallow water and my internal flash did not fire at all. But, again, I need to practice with the settings. In the living room, all was fine, but when you are out in the water, bobbing around with sealions, sharks and rays swimming about, it's a bit challenging to float there making mode adjustments

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Most pics I took seem to be really late and/or not so clear. Missed out on that sealion swimming right under me
video mode. I found better than expected. got some decent video of some leopard sharks and bat rays even though the water was quite merky at times. one frustration though...cannot zoom in or out while recording. That kind of sucked. Also found when shooting in the distance, it seem to really pixelate the image. this didn't make much sense. Some video was very clear, and some very pixelated beyond recognition on the same setting. I'll have to experiment more to figure out why this happened.
Overall impression. I'm still excited about the camera. I need to do more experimentation, but I think in the long run, I'll be happy with it. I did not experiment with the strobe yet underwater since I was just doing free diving in shallow waters. But, I will be checking it out in some carib water in a couple weeks, and give a full report then.
The land pics I took seem to have a more normal shutter speed. The quality of the pics does not rival my Nikon or Canon SLR digital cameras, however, that is not why I bought it. And with a little help from Photoshop, I hope to get some really good pics in the future with it.
Anyway, I don't know if this was really helpful to anyone, but it's just my first impression in open water.....
Oh, battery life....I did not have any problem with that. listening to everyone else, I thought I would not get through a day of free diving with it. But, I had battery life left over. I was actually trying to kill the battery and I didn't. So, battery life was good. But, again, I never went below 25 feet, and then only stayed down for less than a minute at a time. but, I did leave the camera on most of the dive, and while floating on surface.....